


"Like A Crazy Person"

by SureAsEggs



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Arkham Asylum generally being terrible, Gen, Solitary Confinement, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 12:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SureAsEggs/pseuds/SureAsEggs
Summary: Ed's time in Arkham after the end of Season Two is less than therapeutic.





	"Like A Crazy Person"

He doesn’t eat because he’s not hungry. Because he can choose not to. Because the food is abhorrent. Because he wants to know what will happen. Because it would be easier to die.

What’s the right answer?

It’s been a long time since anyone has talked to him. Possibly more than a week: he’s been counting floor tiles but not days.

(One hundred eighty five and a quarter bricks in the walls, two thousand eighteen and a half diamond-shaped holes in the security grating, four thousand three hundred twenty seven stitches in the mattress. It’s too hard to check the thread count of the blanket by the dim light of the window, so he doesn’t use it, leaves it balled up in the far corner no matter how cold the room gets.

Statistically speaking, it’s easier to concentrate at lower temperatures. He’s sure he read that somewhere.)

His head aches. He complains about it to the guards who shove pre-packaged meals through the slot. He fakes a crying fit to gain sympathy, and it’s disturbingly realistic; he can’t calm himself down again. A uniformed woman tells him that he can cry all he wants, but as a high-risk escapee, he’ll be confined to his cell until restructuring is complete and security procedures are back in place.

They’ve secured him quite effectively already. He has nothing to do. Nothing to think about.

Just the basement. Inhuman sounds issuing from near-human mouths, scar tissue and dead eyes sewn together in a mockery of every natural law. There had been a man down there who had called out to him, he’s almost certain. Or maybe he’s imagining things again. It would be such a relief to believe that.

He lays in an empty cell on a plastic mattress, staring at the ceiling and listening to the cacophony of his fellow prisoners failing to cope.

He tries reason. Threats. Begging. He cries again, without planning for it. Nobody pays him any attention.

Something happened to Hugo Strange. That’s all he knows. That is the fullest extent of what he can surmise.

Jim Gordon hauled him out of his cell to the brain-melting symphony of alarms, demanded upon pain of death that he open the secret elevator, and then the next thing he knew he was waking up back in lockdown with a painful contusion on the back of his head.

Who runs Wayne Enterprises? He doesn’t _know_.

It’s not his fault that his hands are shaking. He’s always flinched at unexpected sounds, and it’s such a fine line to cross before flinching at imaginary ones.

Nothing fits here, nobody will answer his riddles, so he repeats them to himself until the words start to lose their meaning. He watches himself lean against the door and laugh. He knows he shouldn’t legitimize hallucinations. He yells back anyway, screaming at himself until his throat feels raw and his voice comes in strangled whispers.

He slams his fist against the infuriatingly inoffensive off-white wall, but only out of anxiety and frustration, not because he’s actually out of his mind like the man across the hall who howls and beats against things for senseless reasons. When his knuckles split, he smears a bloody question mark into the eggshell paint.

He knows he’s slipping. What is he supposed to do?

(What do you do with a dead chemist?

Barium.)

Is this how Penguin felt? Alone and helpless and unreal? What had they done to him? Did they take him to the basement?

Jim Gordon had said Penguin didn’t turn him in. He doubts that now more than ever. What would’t he say to get out of here? What wouldn’t he say to keep from ever coming back?

He dreams of Miss Kringle and wakes up sobbing. He sings Penguin’s song to calm himself down.

_My mother looks over me._

Looks over.

Overlooks.

Semantics.

He could die in here and nobody would ever notice.

When one of the guards finally opens the door, it’s such a shock that he recoils, scrambles backwards to brace himself against a solid wall.

It takes too long to understand what’s happening. He’s led down a hallway, and realizes that he recognizes signs, door numbers. It’s all just as he left it; he’d mapped everything out in his mind back when he found his way underground.

How long has it been? What’s wrong with him? Who could possibly want to see him?

He has no prediction, that’s what’s terrifying. Miss Kringle is dead. He might as well be. His mind is white noise as he’s pushed into the visitor’s room, pleading eyes and a severed hand, the hydrolyzed remains of Officer Dougherty circling down the laboratory basin.

Four, now. One-two-three he’d told Penguin, and then the police officer. Four. Not just three.

He can’t make the world stabilize enough to get his bearings. Anyone could be waiting for him in here, anything could happen and there’s nothing he can do about it, his heart is pounding and his head hurts and he feels like he might pass out.

The guard gestures forward, reminding him that Arkham has a limited time allotment for guests.

He holds his breath and looks up.

“Ed,” Penguin says warmly.

Just like that, out loud. Ed’s name.

This is probably real. There’s nobody else in the room. Why would the guard have brought him here if the visitor was a hallucination? Stupid, that’s stupid. It has to be real.

Oswald Cobblepot stands up from his place at the visitor’s table and smiles, adjusting his jacket like they’re meeting at a classy dinner party.

In all likelihood, Ed had meant to help him. Would have gone after him at the first opportunity, found him, saved him. Brought him home and kept him warm and protected until he felt like himself again.

Surely he would have. Surely he never would have thrown Penguin back onto Gotham’s unforgiving streets.

Who would abandon someone they cared about after an experience like Arkham?

Ed remains motionless as Penguin crosses the room. He appreciates the irregular gait, the syncopated rhythm so reassuringly distinctive. Penguin lays a hand on his arm and notes that Ed has lost weight.

There could be any number of reasons for this, triumph or revenge or manipulation, far-off figures in Italian suits, Ed’s unraveling providing the necessary threads to navigate Gotham’s maze.

Is it a worthwhile gamble?

Ed doesn’t care, anymore.

“I visited your mother’s grave. I brought sword lilies.” Ed is talking too fast. How fast do people talk? “Gladioli aren’t true lilies of course, not taxonomically speaking, but I thought they fulfilled the spirit of your request.”

Penguin guides him forward to sit, smiling all the while. “They were beautiful,” he says softly. “I can’t thank you enough.”

Ed attempts to smile back, to exhibit conversational competence if nothing else, but falls just short.

It doesn’t seem to bother Penguin. “I heard how it all happened,” he says. His voice and expression seem too steady to be mocking, which means Jim Gordon had been telling the truth; Penguin isn’t here to gloat. Instead, he reaches forward with one hand, resting it atop the table. “If I’d been there…”

There are at least two ways to interpret that. Threat or consolation? Does Penguin regret not being there to prevent a friend’s collapse, or not being there to relish a heartless narcissist’s downfall? Ed can’t tell. The time they shared has to count for something. But so does the sound of Ed slamming the door.

“You’re here now,” Ed says, managing not to glance back at the guard monitoring their conversation.

Penguin reaches an inch further, just enough to tip himself forward, to fully commit his posture. “Who better to help you through this than Arkham’s biggest success story? Do you remember the last time you saw me, Ed?”

Ed does. Oh, he does. He’d do it all over again, given the chance.

“Look at me now,” Penguin says.

Ed tries.

He tries to let go of however long he’s spent in Arkham, tries to find some objectivity, to look up and analyze Penguin the way he’d once spent hours doing in his apartment.

It feels like so long ago.

Penguin had been unmistakable, untouchable, just a breath too real to truly understand. Even bandaged and wearing Ed’s pajamas, there had been an icy glint in his eyes that had defied all sympathy. He had been lonely and harrowing, almost omniscient, and Ed still remembers the physical ache he’d suffered watching him in the vulnerability of sleep.

That’s why it had been so hard to meet Penguin’s eyes again afterward, to see him lukewarm and helpless in the waking world.

It hadn’t been right. Arkham wasn’t _right_. This place could hurt you in ways nobody should ever be hurt, could unmake you and leave you stripped utterly bare.

Maybe it’s useless. Maybe the only thing Ed can do is tell Penguin to run, the way Penguin once told him to forget and not look back. Who knows whether either of them will survive? Who cares? He’ll be vivisected in an underground lab or starve while counting bricks and Penguin will bleed out at the wrong end of a mobster’s gun and maybe they’ll meet again in hell someday; Ed is willing to look forward to that.

But Penguin doesn’t let him retreat. He closes the final few inches, brushes his cool fingertips against the back of Ed’s hand. His smile is sharp and bright, a crack in the ice. “Look at me, Ed.”

Ed shivers.

Penguin looks at him with triumph, or with tender understanding. “Completely rehabilitated,” he says.

Ed notices his own sheen of tears in the same instant he realizes he’s stopped breathing.

Penguin made it out.

He came back for Ed.

Maybe it’s not over quite yet.


End file.
